Tom Stoppard’s 1993 masterpiece Arcadia is rarely revived. Fans say it’s his most perfect work; critics that it’s brainy, too wordy, and too specific to its pre-millennial moment. Back in the ’90s, writers and literary academics were more rock and roll than scientists, a new discovery about Byron could feasibly make the front page of the Sun newspaper, and pop culture was as yet unlittered by scientific metaphors for life, the universe and everything.
Both fans and critics are right. However Stoppard’s melancholy intellectual comedy, which counterpoints characters in the same English country house in two very different time periods, remains a unique and dazzling work.
It won’t make you reconsider the nature of love or the state of the nation, it doesn’t have a Lear or a Rooster Byron to raise hell, in fact, its dozen characters are a bouquet of amusing foibles and intellectual positions, less memorable than the ideas they express, less likeable than the laughs they provide. Unusually, it’s the construction of the play which is indelibly brilliant: the way it weaves together characters from two eras, the 1990s and the early 19th century, in a cat’s cradle of fiercely expounded ideas including but not limited to chaos theory, determinism, Newtonian steam entropy, the overthrow of reason by passion, the sex lives of the Romantic poets and the cultural significance of changing styles in landscape gardening.
As a pair of rival academics in the 1990s try to unearth the mysteries of the house’s past, themes and searching questions about nature and free will are posed and developed across the generations, gathering force and pathos. Arcadia is like a polymathic theatrical hack of Bach’s Goldberg variations: a precisely calibrated dance to the music of time, whose tragic insight is that time, unlike other forces in the Newtonian universe, only travels one way.
Carrie Cracknell’s astute, sensitive revival transfers to the West End from the Old Vic with a partly new cast, who are mostly very good. It’s set in the round, a slightly awkward setup here in the freshly re-christened Tom Stoppard Theatre (Duke of York’s Theatre no more). Sixty or so seats have been added to the back and sides of the stage to form a round, but there’s an odd camber, with the usual stalls a few feet lower below the stage and not much elbow room for the actors to come on and off.
Designer Alex Eales wisely doesn’t try to furnish a country house in these circs: the set is bare except for a table and a couple of benches, and dominated by a huge glowing ceiling mobile of elliptical orbits and abstract heavenly spheres. Coupled with a revolving stage, and bits of physical direction which show the characters arriving to their positions in slow-motion, it emphasises the beauty and but also the coolness and detachment of a play whose characters are also diagrams; dancers on a music box or balls on a billiard table, bodies whose movements are mostly but not entirely predictable.
The particular star of an impressive firmament of actors is Isis Hainsworth as Thomasina Coverly: a gifted mathematician and the daughter of the house in the 19th century timeline, she ages gorgeously from 13 to nearly 17, managing the potentially problematic final business of falling for her tutor, twentysomething cad and friend of Byron, Septimus Hodge (Seamus Dillane), with grace and aplomb.
Their relationship and her underappreciated talent is central to the play’s pathos and its mystery, and Hainsworth makes Thomasina’s intellectual and emotional precocity very loveable. Matthew Steer also shines as cuckolded minor poet Ezra Chater, quick to challenge Hodge over his ‘carnal embrace’ with Mrs Chater in the gazebo, even quicker to back down. Yolanda Kettle is outstanding as Lady Croom, Thomasina’s predatory mother, bringing a nicely period mixture of arrogance and subtlety and making the most of her many zingers.
The whole ensemble feels slightly uneven, but newcomer Nikki Amuka-Bird anchors the 1990s group, playing resident feminist scholar Hannah Jarvis with compassion and authority. As unscrupulous rival academic Bernard Nightingale, fellow ensemble newbie Oliver Chris is her comic foil, playing a smarter, older version of his rollnecked ’80s TV presenter in Rivals. The modern lot are lumbered with some explainers, including lengthy blah about patterns in grouse populations, that really should have stayed on Stoppard’s blackboard.
It’s notable that almost all the characters here are motivated by intellectual curiosity and ambition: in both its eras, the house is crammed with mathematicians, scholars, poets, amateur archaeologists and designers.‘It’s all trivial,’ says Hannah to modern son-of-the-house, Valentine, also a mathematician. ‘Your grouse, my hermit, Bernard’s Byron. Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in.’ Wordy? Yes. Brainy? Unashamedly.
Hollywood movies with ‘genius’ characters and so-so science metaphors have proliferated in the thirty-odd years since Arcadia’s premiere, but it is still startlingly unusual for an English country house to be a dramatic arena for something other than period marriage comedy or detective fiction. Arcadia has knowing elements of both, which add to the fun. But they're not the driving force. Even if its academic arguments sometimes outstay their welcome, it is satisfying and thought-provoking and rare to be able to spend three hours in the company of a drama whose fiery propulsive engine is an unquenchable search for knowledge.
